Okay, so, “virgin first time,” huh? Sounds kinda sus, but alright, let’s talk about my first time… deploying to Kubernetes. Get your minds out of the gutter!
It all started with a super basic “Hello, World!” app I wrote in Python. I was all hyped up after watching some YouTube videos about how K8s was the future and would solve all my problems. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
First, I had to Dockerize my app. That seemed easy enough. Created a Dockerfile, threw in some pip install commands, and boom, image built! I felt like a goddamn DevOps engineer.
Next up was the Kubernetes YAML files. Oh boy. I started with the classic Deployment and Service. Copy-pasted some examples from the internet, changed the image name, and thought I was golden.
kubectl apply -f *… and then the errors started pouring in. I swear, it was like the damn thing was designed to be confusing. Spent a solid hour debugging indentation errors and typos. Finally got the deployment up, but the service wasn’t working right. Turns out I’d messed up the port mapping.
Okay, fixed that. Now the service was running, but I couldn’t access it from my browser. More googling. Turns out I needed to create an Ingress. Another YAML file, another round of head-scratching and Stack Overflow copy-pasting.
After what felt like an eternity, I finally got my “Hello, World!” app accessible through my browser. I was so damn proud of myself. I went and celebrated with a beer (or two).
But the real fun started when I tried to scale it. I wanted to see this K8s magic in action. kubectl scale deployment hello-world --replicas=5. Looked good, right? Nope. The new pods were crashing. Turns out my app wasn’t designed to handle multiple instances. I had to rewrite the damn thing to be stateless.
It was a total mess. Configuration problems, network issues, resource limits… you name it, I screwed it up. But hey, that’s how you learn, right? I eventually got everything working, but it took way longer than I expected. And honestly, for a simple “Hello, World!” app, it was probably overkill.
Lessons learned:
- Kubernetes is not a silver bullet. It’s powerful, but it’s also complex.
- Don’t just copy-paste YAML files. Understand what each setting does.
- Start small. Don’t try to deploy your entire application on your first try.
- Be prepared to spend a lot of time debugging.
- Stack Overflow is your friend.
Would I do it again? Yeah, probably. Kubernetes is definitely worth learning, even if it’s a pain in the ass at times. Just don’t expect it to be a walk in the park, especially for your “virgin first time”.
